Past Present Future

Lea Ypi, author of 'The Handover', discusses the power of the state, the impact of AI on human-corporate relationships, and the need to understand artificial agents and institutions in our modern world.

The podcast answers listener questions about political essays and essayists, discussing topics such as civil disobedience in the anti-vaccine movement, challenges in finding time to write, the role of religion in politics, the impact of political parties in democracy, the nature of essays and the rise of good essays in current online publications.

Joan Didion, a celebrated essayist, discusses her famous work 'The White Album' that explores the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. She touches upon Jim Morrison, the Manson murders, and the search for truth amidst chaos. The podcast also explores the concept of chaos, storytelling, and the limitations of naming and conventional responses in understanding the world.

Susan Sontag, an influential figure in art, criticism, and the avant-garde, discusses her essay 'Against Interpretation'. The episode explores interpretation in art, criticism, and politics, examining Sontag's views on cinema and the overproduction of experiences. It highlights the impact of political system forms on outcomes, the significance of understanding the artist's intention, and Sontag's obsession with courage and the erotics of art.

James Baldwin, a prominent writer and civil rights activist, discusses topics such as his complicated relationship with a cruel father, the racial hierarchy during the New Deal, racial dynamics during World War II, confronting injustice and risks, and his response to anger and hatred.

This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building blocks of modern life: democracy, rights, personal identity, scientific progress – all these are rejected. What does Weil have to put in their place? The answer is radical and surprising.Read ‘Human Personality’ hereFor more on Weil from the LRB archive:Toril Moi on living like Weil ‘If we take Weil as seriously as she took herself, our nice lives will fall apart.’Alan Bennett on Kafka and Weil‘Many parents, one imagines, would echo the words of Madame Weil, the mother of Simone Weil, a child every bit as trying as Kafka must have been. Questioned about her pride in the posthumous fame of her ascetic daughter, Madame Weil said: “Oh! How much I would have preferred her to be happy.”’ Sign up to LRB Close Readings:Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week David discusses George Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), his great wartime essay about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English. How did the English manage to resist fascism? How are the English going to defeat fascism? These were two different questions with two very different answers: hypocrisy and socialism. David takes the story from there to Brexit and back again.For more on Orwell from the LRB:Samuel Hynes on Orwell and politics‘He was not, in fact, really a political thinker at all: he had no ideology, he proposed no plan of political action, and he was never able to relate himself comfortably to any political party.’Julian Symons on Orwell and fame‘If George Orwell had died in 1939 he would be recorded in literary histories of the period as an interesting maverick who wrote some not very successful novels.’Terry Eagleton on Orwell and experience‘Orwell detested those, mostly on the left, who theorised about situations without having experienced them, a common empiricist prejudice. There is no need to have your legs chopped off to sympathise with the legless.’More from the History of Ideas:Judith Shklar on HypocrisySign up to LRB Close Readings:Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week our history of the great essays and great essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being about so much else besides: anger, power, sex, modernity, independence and transcendence. And how, despite all that, it still manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.Read more on Virginia Woolf in the LRB:Jacqueline Rose on Woolf and madness‘It is, one might say, a central paradox of modern family life that its members are required to mould themselves in each other’s image and yet to know, as separate individuals or egos, exactly who they are.’Gillian Beer on Woolf and reality‘The “real world” for Virginia Woolf was not solely the liberal humanist world of personal and social relationships: it was the hauntingly difficult world of Einsteinian physics and Wittgenstein’s private languages.’Rosemary Hill on Woolf and domesticity‘Woolf, who had once found it humiliating to do her own shopping, spent the last morning of her life dusting with Louie, before she put her duster down and went to drown herself.’John Bayley on Woolf and writing‘For Virginia Woolf wish-fulfilment was in words themselves, that protected her from herself and from society.’Listen to David’s History of Ideas episode about Max Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’.Sign up to LRB Close Readings:Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week David talks to American historian Gary Gerstle about the shape-shifting journey of the US Republican Party, from the Civil War to the battles of today. How did the party of the North become the party of the South? When did the war party lose its appetite for war? Why does an organisation born out of anti-Catholicism now see its mission as to get Catholics onto the Supreme Court? And what could finally break the party apart?Gary Gerstle’s latest book is The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.For more on the Great Abortion Switcheroo of the 1970s.Listen again to David’s episode on Hume and American default.Sign up to LRB Close Readings:Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the third episode in this series about the great political essays, David explores Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars. How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion? Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite? And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?Read Thoreau’s essay hereFrom the LRB:Paul Laity on Thoreau and self-sufficiencyJeremy Harding on XR and civil disobedience Sign up to LRB Close Readings:Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices